Day 70 - How About Those Ads...

Rudolph Truck

June 17th, 2015

Today is the last day I have without employment! I neglected to mention the fact that I was offered the job. I’m uneasy about the whole “commission only” thing, but if I can improve my ability to talk, then I could make a lot of money in the short period of time. Sorely needed, at that. As I’ve said before, it'd be nice to be able to see some of the country before I depart.

If my visa goes through (as I hope it does), that gives me roughly one more month in Perth, and one month to travel around. I’m thinking maybe a week up north, two weeks on the east coast, and a week in Bali. I’ll have to see how that works out for flights and costs, but might as well dream big!

Gym, Laundry, Store, and Cooking enough food for a couple days. Then... Mustang? I had plans with Shimou, Natty, and Gaspar, but those have fallen through and leave me floating in the ether of free time. The “product training” is tomorrow at 10am, so it’s not impossibly early, and only lasts 3 hours. Hopefully I get a charity, and one that is easy to pitch.

What an interesting tableau

Today, a whack of people moved out of the house. Four people out of eight in a six room house.  As expected, the plans changed. I ended up taking the train to Shimou’s. We hung out, learned a bit more mandarin, and talked about unicorns and fluffy bunnies.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this yet, but the ads around Perth are a bit.. different than North America. Examples: one is in a fairly popular shopping centre, a billboard-sized ad, half of a hairy gut, and the other half of liposuction surgery taking place. Blech. That’s the gross out side, the other is stuff like “My son trusted them.. and now he’s DEAD” with a low-saturation photo of an old, sad woman - it’s about unions. For the first, I have the question of: is that gross ad actually doing anything to change anyone’s behaviour? Is there not already enough social pressure on people to be more fit? I mean, it’s not like it’s highly desirable to be overweight; it’s so undesirable that eating disorders are a fairly common occurrence. What I’m getting at is that the money spent on those ads could probably be put to better use to actually increase health awareness - both nutrition and exercise knowledge - or maybe even putting limits on what can be sold, or how it needs to be packaged. Just a thought.